Time Present and Time Past (8 page)

She looks in on Beth as she always does before leaving the house, quietly adding a jug of milk to the tray that had been set the night before: the bowl of cereal with a plate over it; the fruit; the cup inverted on its saucer; the tea-caddy; the little kettle. When she wakes, Beth will prepare her own breakfast and eat it in bed. Mid-morning, Martina will ring her from the shop to check that she's up and dressed, that everything's fine. But for now Beth is still fast asleep; and the cat too, curled in the crook of her knees. Martina withdraws and carefully closes the bedroom door.

She reaches the shop at eight-thirty. She raises the external electric shutter with a key; and as soon as she opens the door and goes in, the alarm starts to beep. She hurries through to the stock-room at the back to tap in the security code and immediately the beeping stops. Now she can relax. She walks back into the main body of the shop, and savours the silence.

Martina looks at herself in one of the many large mirrors provided for the customers. Today she's wearing an olive-green silk dress, simply cut, with an amber necklace. It looks perfect, she thinks, and the shop is perfect too. Recently refitted, it is all pale wood and chrome, with new racks designed to make it easy to put together an outfit: co-ordinating pieces are displayed beside one another, together with accessories, scarves and bags. It always astonishes her that many of her customers, including her own dear sister-in-law, fail to pick up on this rather obvious guidance.

No matter where she has worked, Martina has always loved this moment of being in a shop just before it opens, just before she moves fully into her professional persona. She is sensible to the theatrical nature of what she does; is aware of it every night as she selects from her own wardrobe what she will wear the following day. She likes the slight distance there is in her dealings with the public, enjoys constructing a self for the customers to encounter.

By evening time, when the shop closes, it will be in disarray. There will be empty hangers, garments replaced in the wrong sections or displayed askew, the wooden floors will be grubby and scuffed; but this does not bother her. Before going home she will put everything to rights, and tomorrow morning it will all begin again.

The family doesn't appreciate what an accomplishment it has been for her, opening this shop and making such a success of it. She's always proud when it's mentioned in magazine features as being a special place: somewhere with exceptional stock; hard-to-find labels; things that you can't buy elsewhere in Ireland. It had always been her dream to have her own shop, but while she was living in London it had never been a possibility. Well, it had all worked out, in spite of the circumstances that had brought her home. She pulls her mind back from that line of thought, as she habitually does.

In the storeroom at the back of the shop she makes herself a cup of green tea, and as she drinks it she thinks about last night. She's sorry now that she loaned Fintan those photographs. She would have liked to have had them at hand yesterday evening, for she would have liked to look again at the picture of Edward, after having spoken to him.

She'd always liked him. Even as a child he'd been steady and sensible in a way she admired: he wasn't a cry-baby like Fintan, nor an imp like herself. She remembers playing cards with him on wet afternoons; remembers him giving her a robin's nest to take back to the city. There'd been something slightly courtly in his country manners, a formality that had appealed to her, and made him seem always older than he was.

He served at Mass. The first time she saw him up on the altar, walking out from the sacristy behind the priest in the company of two other little boys, she'd started to laugh, and Granny Buckley had had to smack her on the knee to make her stop. She hadn't laughed because she thought it was funny, but because it was strange, so incongruous; in the same way that she'd laughed when she saw Fintan on stage in the school nativity play, dressed as a shepherd. Edward's ecclesiastical duties had become more familiar to her, but they never lost their particular glamour, and she watched him closely as he snuffed out candles, as he generated clouds of incense from a smoking thurible and rattled the chain of it.

Last night when she'd gone to ring him, she'd misdialled at first and got a wrong number. An old man had answered the phone, and she'd quickly ascertained her mistake, but the old man had been uneasy. She'd understood his anxiety and guessed that he was living on his own, was fearful of burglars and confidence-tricksters. She told him she'd been trying to ring her cousin, she'd reassured him, and then he said in the soft accent she remembered from her childhood, ‘That's grand, Daughter. Goodnight.'

She'd been strangely moved when she hung up. No-one had called her ‘Daughter' in that way, as a term of endearment, for so many years now that she had even forgotten this particular usage. It made her feel that the old man to whom she had spoken was close geographically to the old home-place but distant in time; as if the phone had allowed her to communicate with someone who was still living in that world she had known as a child; as if he were one of the old farmers who had knelt beside her in the pew, as she watched Edward ringing a small golden bell.

The last time she saw Edward was at her own father's funeral, when they were both teenagers. Her own wild grief at that time she might have expected, given her attachment to her father; but there had been a surreal quality to those days that she could never have predicted. And one of the strangest moments had been at the graveside, for there was Edward walking towards her; but Edward as if he had been bewitched, as if the calm freckled child she had known years earlier had been conjured into this pale young man through whose kind but unfamiliar face she could see shimmer the look of her old
companion
.

There'd been a cautious mending of the relationship with her father's family over the years, but she and Fintan had never gone back after the end of their visits north in the early seventies, and their cousin had drifted out of their lives. Although they had all three been glad to meet again at the funeral, it hadn't marked a real resumption of their friendship. Too much time had passed. They were shy and strange with each other; awkward in the way of adolescence; and over the years it all dwindled into Christmas cards and stray bits of news – marriages, the births of children, Martina's move to England, the passing of Edward's parents. That was how things had stood for years now.

She rinses her cup and checks her watch, decides not to ring Fintan just yet, even though he too likes to arrive early, and will have been in his office for some time now. Martina doesn't know how her brother can stand his job, doesn't know how anyone can stand office life. Decades of looking at the same old colleagues, fiddling around with paperclips and photocopies: it seems even worse to her now than when she was eighteen. She might well have ended up in an office if Joan had got her way: she had wanted Martina to go to college when she left school. ‘Selling lipsticks isn't much of a job, is it?'

Well it had been a very good job indeed, as far as Martina was concerned, and right from the start she had loved working in a shop. She has never forgotten the words of her first supervisor: ‘Remember, you're not selling cosmetics, girls, you're selling beauty.' Even today she considers that she is not selling dresses and jackets and skirts so much as she is selling confidence. She loves helping women to be all they can, coaxing them out of dowdy garments in drab colours and into more flattering attire. She loves dealing with customers who love clothes as much as she herself does, who have the knowledge to put together certain pieces to create a look which women with less style and audacity would never dare. They ask her advice. They confide in her.
Women
buy new clothes for all sorts of reasons. They're going to a party. To the races. To a wedding. They buy clothes because they feel good. They buy clothes because they feel miserable. They've fallen in love. They've been dumped. They've got a new job. They've been sacked. They've had a windfall. They're broke, but they still deserve a treat. Martina has seen women come out of the cubicle, look in the mirror and be shocked. She has seen them look in the mirror and be thrilled. She has seen wives step out of the changing room and husbands gasp. She has seen
daughters
step out of the changing room and
mothers
weep. Martina thinks that you have to have worked in a clothes shop to understand the depths of human emotion and pathos to be found there; to know the drama of it all.

She crosses to the window and looks out onto the street, sees the fishmonger from two doors up; and they smile and wave. All the traders in this little parade know each other. She's glad to be back in Ireland. It's not that she hadn't liked London, but she wouldn't have the energy for it now. The sheer volume of customers she'd had to deal with then in the big department stores where she'd worked had been of a different order; and then there was the city itself.

It had frightened her, to begin with, and she'd coped by denying this, by not admitting, even to herself, how much the crowds appalled her. She knew why she was there: because she'd had more than enough of Dublin by the time she was in her early twenties. She'd been sick of her mother's criticisms; of going out with men only to discover that they had been at school with Fintan; of breaking up with boyfriends only to bump into them in town two days later. If the anonymity of London spooked her at times, it was also one of the things she had gone there to find.

‘Do you miss London?' People were always asking her that, even now, when she'd been home again for so many years. ‘Do you miss London?' She missed it today because it was a Thursday, and that had been her day off towards the end of her time there. She'd loved sleeping late, waking to the light in her own little apartment, taking her time to get washed and dressed instead of rushing for the Tube; and then going out for breakfast, drinking black coffee and reading the papers. She might go shopping herself later in the day, in the high-end stores in Bond Street or Knightsbridge; or meet friends for lunch. She has a great many happy memories from her time in London, from parts of the city she had grown to love: the lights of the Embankment at dusk, the green-and-white striped deckchairs in the parks in summer, the theatres as the lights went down and the curtain rose. Wine-bars and restaurants. Memories that were like bright stones you could keep, that you could take out and inspect and admire; hold them to the light; see them glitter.

To begin with she had enjoyed her job almost as much as her days off. She didn't have a lot of experience in fashion retail when she went there, but she was fortunate in her new colleagues, who helped her. She'd quickly made friends with two other girls, Sally and Nell, who had already been there for a while; and although their supervisor Miss McKenzie had been a bit stern at times, she hadn't been the worst. Martina had shared a flat in Camden with Nell for a couple of years; they'd used to go drinking and dancing with Sally.

But of course nothing stays the same forever. Sally had changed her job and then Martina bought her own little apartment. Nell got married and had twins, moved out of London to somewhere in the distant suburbs; Martina can't now remember the name of the place. She'd lost touch with Nell over the years; and although she still occasionally hears from Sally, who also married and had children but has since divorced, they haven't met for ages. Martina doesn't want to meet either of them again, but there are no hard feelings. It's just that she would rather remember them all as they were, back in the day on the shop floor, impeccable with their gilt name tags and high heels; drinking tea and laughing beside the grey metal lockers in the staff room, or out together for cocktails in some fashionable bar.

It's getting on for nine o'clock now. She goes over to the phone beside the till and rings Fintan, who picks up immediately.

‘I'm glad it's you,' he says. ‘I thought it might be my colleague Imelda. I hope there's nothing wrong.' It's an odd hour, she knows, for her to be ringing him.

‘Do you remember that photo I gave you, of us in the North when we were children, with Granny and the horse? It set me thinking about Edward again, and last night I just decided I would ring him to see how things are.'

‘I wouldn't have thought you would even have a number for him.'

‘I rang directory enquiries.'

‘And you got him?'

‘I did, yes. I was speaking to his wife, Veronica, first, and then he came on the line. Oh Fintan, it was great, but it was so strange. He's the loveliest man. I felt that he was a stranger but that I knew him, if that doesn't sound crazy. We didn't talk to each other like strangers.'

‘It would be incredible to see him again, after all these years.'

‘Well, that's what he suggested, and that's really why I'm calling. He wants us to go up for a visit. He said he'd speak to Veronica about a suitable date, and I said I'd speak to you.'

‘It would be incredible,' Fintan says again.

 They discuss when they might go north, and Martina remarks, ‘I don't know why we lost touch in this way, why we let things drift. Maybe it was partly due to my being out of Ireland for so many years.'

And then Fintan surprises her by saying hesitantly, ‘I don't think I ever told you this, but I'm so glad you came home again from London. To live, I mean.'

‘No,' she says, ‘you never told me that before.'

‘Because of the way it happened – I mean it was a confused period, maybe you weren't even planning to come back, so by the time I realised you were home for good you'd been here a while. I suppose I sort of took it for granted then. But I was thinking about it the other day and I realised how much I'd miss you if you were still away.'